Pauline Kleinberg - October 28, 1982

Hearing about Fate of Older Sister

Your browser does not support the audio element.

Then I heard from other inmates, from other, you know, people were coming here and there from another city, you know. So I heard from one girl, and she came. She was from Zawiercie. She says, "I know from your older sister how she died in Auschwitz, May the 5th, 1944." They were neighbors uh, from one area--like a neighborhood from the--and then ??? says, "My mother died there, my father and uh, your sister's mother-in-law and your sister Sala is the, the oldest one. She had a baby. Her mother-in-law said 'Sala, give me the baby, you have a chance to survive, you're young.' And she was a very pretty girl. 'You're young. You have more chance to survive if you give me the baby. With a baby there was no chance. Maybe they'll put you to work or whatever.'" So she said, she looked at her and said, "Listen mother-in-law, I lost my parents, I lost my sisters. They took away my husband. Now you want to go away with my baby? You want just me to stay?" So she didn't want to, she said, and she died. They put in her in crematorium together. And she was there. She was the only one survivors ???. So from then on I was with her close. So I knew about what happened to this sister. And then with other girls from school here and there, one had lost her mother, one survived, they didn't know if her mother was killed after the war--the Polacks had killed them, they were also in a bunker. And I said, "I hear in Oberschlesien in another camp there are, there are more people." So we--with one girl, tried--we traveled free, you know, the, the trains were uh, broken--bombed. It took us, you know, where normal it takes an hour to go from one place to another, it took us two weeks. But we didn't care. We had no home, no place. So we went to a place called ???. I heard there is a Jewish Comit é ...uh, Committee. Comité. What's the Comité?

Husband: Committee.

Comit é. And, and um, there they have lists of people too and they feed you and they shelter you for twenty-four hours or forty-eight hours until you, you find somebody. So there I see a name, "Pariser," like it said, Pariser. ??? Pariser. "Oh," I said, "it must be my brother. I'll go in there and find out, where is this ??? Pariser?" "Oh yeah, he's here with his brothers." I say, "With his brothers? Couldn't be my brother, he was the only one." They were a distant cousin. They knew me, I didn't know them.